Software Craftsmanship Inc.:
Software development is meant to be fun, if it isn't the process is wrong.

Software Craftsmanship

The concept of software craftsmanship has been around for a long time, the book is my interpretation of those ideas and the challenges that face software developers and the users of software. The book was well received and it won a Productivity Award at the 12th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards in 2002. Software Crafstmanship has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Interestingly the craftsmanship idea is widespread within the Agile Software Development community, but I can claim no credit for that, I was merely documenting a growing trend. Overall there has been a very positive shift in software development in the past few years, users are getting better software and the working environment for software developers is improving.

Although I am known for Questioning XP, it does appear that XP is maturing into an approach that has wide applicability, and the ideas from XP are having a wide impact upon the way that software is being developed. The most notable effect of XP has been the way that the quality assurance and testing communities have had to respond to much higher quality software. If only all our problems were those of success.

Recently I've been doing a lot of work with Ruby to script applications and do data mining against existing databases. Given the way that Ruby has matured over the past few years it is now a very effective means for implementing quite complex functionality in reasonable time. Rails has also proven to be an interesting environment to work in, especially when using TextMate.

I have also been doing quality assurance and testing, often using the Watir tool to script web browsers, but I have found that just using ruby to drive the website has also been effective. Having said that though, most of my work these days focuses around development and development practices.